Arts and Entertainment Reporter

The music business may seem like a rollicking good time, he tells the students he trains for careers in the field. But to succeed in it, graduates of the music business program in the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia, need to learn to hustle.

All year long, he provides ample opportunity for his rock scholars to tool up in the real world, to go a bit beyond the required assignments.

One group, formed as part of their coursework, took Barbe’s prompting a step further, volunteering to manage, market and promote the program’s end-of-semester show, Sunday Funday.

“This is what we want to do for a living,” said Laura Kathryn Kelley, a member of the Hype Entertainment team that organized the event. “So we said, ‘Why not start now?’”

Hype Entertainment, like all the student groups in the music business program, formed through Barbe’s class “Emerging Issues in the Music Industry.”

A main focus of the work inside and outside of class, Barbe said, is creating a microcosm of the music industry. Students start up production crews, record labels, promotion teams — whatever suits their interests – and turn them into viable enterprises, cutting their teeth along the way.

Barbe said the exercise “absolutely” prepares the future label executives, producers and marketers for their off-campus careers.

Some of the groups merge their interests and abilities to help their projects succeed, Barbe said.

For example, Hype Entertainment found a local band, The Breaks, who they considered talented but clueless about the industry, according to Kelley. Hype helped the band book shows and build a social media presence.

When it came time to lay down tracks for the band’s first recording, Kelley and company turned to another music business start-up, Easy Street Productions, to help commit the Breaks to tape.

“It’s about taking people with talent, combining them with our knowledge and putting it all to good use,” Kelley said.

Sunday Funday, the semester-ending event kicking off at the Melting Point this weekend at 1 p.m., not only showcases the music drummed up by the music business family, Kelley said, it’s a chance for students to promote their music businesses.

Studying music business at UGA isn’t an esoteric jam session, Barbe said. He produces “steely” graduates who endure some intense training through which students are taught to outwork the competition.

“There are a lot of moving parts” that the average listener couldn’t fathom, Barbe said. So there is a lot — from legal issues to production skills — for students to learn.

When he introduces each new cohort to the coursework, and the students gets an idea of just how hard they will have to work to complete the program, Barbe asks each student to write him an email answering one question: Are you in or out?

The first year he asked, Barbe said 85 percent of respondents said they were in.

Last fall, the query returned 100 percent positive answers.

Out of the 92 students he taught this year, Barbe said over a third are taking on intensive, serious summer internships.

Barbe said the program is too new to gauge how successful its graduates have been at finding jobs, but he believes, based on the students he has ushered through the program, that “over time, it is going to be a fairly significant percentage.”

Barbe tells his students that they can look at their music business start-up projects in two ways: merely as coursework or as a tangible learning experience they’ll draw from for years.

People might think people in music business are caught up in a rock and roll lifestyle, Barbe said, but his students are anything but.

“I tell them to love the slacker,” Barbe said. “Because they make you look good.”